A Night on the Town
by Folderol
Summary: Sarah has settled into college life and is out for a night of bar-hopping and dancing-- which is never exactly fun when your standards start and end with The Goblin King . The appearance of a certain blonde in tights helps to liven up the evening.
1. Chapter 1

Well hi there. I'm completely new to all this, so forgive me if the formatting goes wonky on accident, I promise I'll fix it. Suggestions are nice and all that. Oh, and I rated this baby M in case of later chapters, but for now it's very tame. So, have fun?

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"A Night on the Town"

All things considered, a night out was not what Sarah Williams needed. Especially seeing as how it was Thursday, and the biochemistry final-- the final that decided whether she'd scrape through junior year with the GPA that her renewable scholarship rested on-- was scheduled for nine in the morning on Friday, and she hadn't done any studying for it since, well, ever.

This did not matter to Sarah's roommates, Roxanne and Katie. The two friends were entering the last days of their "Bet I Can Lay More Guys Than You Can This Semester" contest, and both were determined to up their final scores by bar-hopping every night that week. Though Sarah had politely declined their invitation to enter the competition, she was nevertheless expected to attend these outings as a dutiful wingman.

"Come on, Sare-bear," Roxanne pleaded sweetly, tugging at Sarah's shirtsleeve with one arm while straightening shoulder-length red hair with the other. "It'll be fun."

"I don't know," Sarah sighed. She looked at their reflections in the bathroom mirror and frowned. Roxanne had already done her makeup and slipped into a gorgeous blue halter top and skinny jeans. Sarah, just back from her nightly jog around campus, was still in baggy sweats. Baggy sweats that smelled.

"Sarah, Roxy's right," Katie called from her bedroom. "a redhead and a blonde are just a redhead and a blonde. A redhead, a blonde and a brunette are, like, the Triumvirate of Sexy."

"Triumvirate," Roxanne cooed, finishing off her do with a cloud of hairspray big enough to double the hole in the ozone layer.

"I haven't even showered yet," Sarah complained. "and I've kinda got this test tomorrow…"

"Boohoo," said Katie, appearing from her room in a slinky red blouse and a pencil skirt. Her honey-blonde hair bounced in tight curls around an impish face. "I've got three tests tomorrow. You don't see me worrying about it."

"Come on," repeated Roxanne. She was already at the bath tub, running the hot water. "just hop in the shower real quick. I'll grab something out of your closet for you to change into."

"I-" Sarah attempted, but Roxanne was already disappearing behind Sarah's bedroom door. "Fine, but I'm coming home at a reasonable hour!"

"That's what she said on Saint Patrick's Day," Katie snickered. Sarah scowled at her without much anger and closed the bathroom door. Steam was already beginning to fog up the mirror as she peeled the jogging pants off of her sweat-soaked legs.

Sarah had a hard time getting mad at Roxanne and Katie. She hadn't known them before replying to their ad for a third roommate, but the past year had made them close friends. Sure, they took the idea of casual sex and ran so far with it that Casanova himself would be left choking on their dust, but when you really needed someone to talk to, they were there in an instant. Besides, if it weren't for them, Sarah would probably never get out. Three years at one of the biggest public schools in the United States, and she still hadn't found a guy that caught her attention.

"Not that I don't know why," she muttered to herself as she squeezed the last of the dollar-store shampoo into her hair. Oh, great. Thinking about him in the shower. That wasn't a terrible plan at all.

The thirteen hours spent in the Labyrinth had been all of six years ago for Sarah. It had been more than enough time for her to realize what a fifteen-year-old babysitter couldn't possibly have: She had met, danced with, and subsequently turned down the physical embodiment of sex.

She'd done it for all the right reasons, of course. She couldn't just let Toby become a goblin, or go through the trials she'd faced just to lose in the final round. And he had probably just been saying all that "mornings of gold" stuff for the sake of winning the game. Besides, even if he had been interested, having her first sexual encounter at the age of fifteen with a being from another world would have been wrong beyond all belief.

Valid as they were, these explanations didn't make Sarah any more interested in the frat boys her friends introduced her to.

The hot water ran out much too soon and began to turn icy. Yelping, Sarah sprung out of the shower and dried off.

"Yeah, it's been doing that," Roxanne sighed, hearing the plaintive cry. She and Katie had been lounging across the sofa watching "The Colbert Report" when Sarah appeared in the living room amidst a cloud of steam. "I laid a top out on your bed. That tight one that you never have the balls to wear."

"Thanks," Sarah rolled her eyes and headed to her room.

"And I lent you a pair of jeans that'll make your butt look good," Katie added. "and Roxy lent you some stilettos. And we both went through your underwear drawer and found the _one _pair of lacy panties that you own. "

"Touching, but I don't really plan on letting anyone see what's under the clothes, and you know I can't walk in stilettos," Sarah called back. She slipped the powder-pink top over her shoulders and smoothed it down her belly, noting with apprehension how very thin the fabric was. Her hair, the one physical feature that had never given her cause to be angry, was already drying into long, loose waves. She quickly applied some lip gloss and mascara and checked herself in the mirror.

"There," she told herself, "I almost look like I'm interested in meeting somebody."

"Ready?" Roxanne and Katie shouted.

Sarah grabbed her purse and was greeted at the front door by a pair of wolf whistles. Roxanne drew a small glass vial out of her purse and launched an attack at Sarah's neck.

"Jeez, can we tone down on the perfume?" Sarah coughed. Roxanne shrugged and put the bottle away.

"What'd I tell you?" Katie grinned. "No guy in the world stands a chance against the three of us."

"Too bad I'm not interested in any of them," Sarah frowned.

What nobody noticed, scratching at the window as they carefully locked the apartment door behind them, was the owl.


	2. Chapter 2

"Bobby Paige," Katie shouted delightedly over an onslaught of music, "where _have_ you been all night?"

The crew-cut blonde who Katie referred to as Bobby Paige smiled drunkenly and teetered his way through the dark, crowded bar towards the girls.

"I was at a house party earlier, but watching people lose to me at beer pong got boring," he said. "Hey, you're Katie from Agricultural Science, right?"

"One and the same," Katie smiled, then gestured benevolently over to the bar stools that Roxanne and Sarah had perched themselves upon, "these are my roommates, Roxanne and Sarah."

Roxanne immediately crossed one leg over the other and leaned over to shake Bobby's hand.

"Nice to meet you," she said sweetly, and exchanged a competitive glance with Katie that said "it's on".

"So, if she's Roxanne," Bobby said, twirling an inebriated index finger through the air before stopping it in front of Sarah's nose, "You must be Sarah."

"Yep. That's me."

"Doesn't Sarah mean "beautiful" in French?"

"No, I'm pretty sure that's Belle."

"Oh. Well, what does Sarah mean?"

"I don't think it means anything."

"Right, right," he frowned and turned back to Katie. "So, got any of that damn essay done?"

Roxanne pouted and redirected her gaze towards the dance floor.

"I'll waste time trying to go head-on for the same guy," she theorized out loud.

"I had no idea that getting laid required this much strategy," Sarah laughed as she sipped a coke and rum.

"It does if you want to beat Katie's record," Roxanne said, and grabbed Sarah by the wrist as she hopped off her bar stool. "Come on, there's some singles on the dance floor," she smirked devilishly, "Let's grab a couple for ourselves."

Sarah looked at the men hanging around the dance floor and grimaced. Most of them looked very close to the totter-over-to-the-dumpster-and-puke phase of the evening. She removed the straw from her drink and downed the rest of it in one gulp.

"Try to pick a pair without acne this time," she sighed.

"That a'girl!" Roxanne grinned, and before Sarah could say anything else she was being led by the arm into the center of a crowd of heated bodies.

The last song ended and a low, heavy beat picked up. Roxanne pressed her hand to Sarah's shoulder and steered her towards a pair of guys who'd been watching them make their way across the room. Roxanne sidled up to one, a slender brunette in a red polo. His buddy, a broad-shouldered boy with an extremely freckled face, wrapped an arm over Sarah's waist and drunkenly pulled her closer in an attempt to dance together.

"What's your name?" he shouted over the din.

"Sarah," Sarah shouted back. Freckles grinned and nodded as if she'd just let him in on a big secret.

"Sarah, you're totally fucking hot!" he shouted, and lunged down in an attempt to make their lips connect. Sarah craned her neck the other way, stopped her feeble attempts at swaying her hips in time with his and put a hand to her head in disgust.

"Yeah, thanks. Hey Roxy," Sarah shouted. Roxanne looked over in sudden alarm. She already had one thigh wrapped around her dance partner.

"I'm done here. I'll meet you back at the apartment," Sarah called over the music. Roxanne nodded, pointed up to the man who would thereafter be known as Number Thirty Nine, and mouthed "I'm bringing him with." Sarah gave her the thumbs up and pushed away from her dance partner. On her way to the front door, she thought she caught a glimpse of Katie leading Bobby Paige into the women's bathroom.

The chill night air hit her grateful skin in a rush as she squeezed through the crowd to the front door. She pushed her cell phone up out of her tight jeans pocket and checked the time.

"Oh crap," she muttered "it's already five!" Well, looked like her plans for studying were over. At this point, the best thing to do would probably just be to get home and have a good night's rest before the Biochem final. Of course, this was only if Sarah's definition of "good night's rest" was half an hour of walking home buzzed, three hours of lying in bed trying to fall asleep, and waking up to a shower that stopped running hot water whenever it damn well felt like. Yeah. Super.

"Wish _I _could reorder time," Sarah muttered under her breath as she passed a gaggle of freshmen in miniskirts. Sarah noted the words as they came out of her mouth, and begrudgingly accepted the fact that she'd been thinking about the one person who could do such things all night. Damn that goblin bastard. Freckles might have even been attractive if he'd been sober, but would Sarah ever recognize that? Hell no. Her standards were impossibly high thanks to His Majesty.

"Get him out of your mind, you nut," she chided herself, crossing a street just as the "walk" sign disappeared and dashing over into the quad. It wasn't the most well-lit place on campus at this time of night, but cutting across it would save her a few minutes. "You're probably losing your scholarship tomorrow. That means you'll need a second job to even pay for next year. You've got a lot more to worry about than a six-year-old infatuation with a jerkwad in tights."

As Sarah hurriedly stomped through the muddy grass of the school quad in borrowed stilettos, desperate to get home and gain what little rest she could, she failed to notice two things: One, the owl perched on the corner of the English building. Two, the football someone had left on the lawn earlier that day.

In one divinely clumsy moment worthy of Charlie Brown, Sarah's left foot went down expecting grass and found pigskin instead. The football rolled-- her ankle rolled with it-- and before she could steady herself she had face-planted in the dirt.

A string of expletives rose up out of the grass so foul that every homeless person and college kid in the outlying area heard it and fled to safety. Sarah grimaced in pain as she sat up. She looked from her swollen ankle to her shirt, which was now a clinging mess of wet mud and grass stains , and dropped three or four more f-bombs for good measure.

"I would have been better off spending a night with the Goblin King!" she shouted in anger. The owl could not have asked for a better cue.

"Well, now. And here I was beginning to think that you enjoyed torturing yourself in this manner."

Sarah did not know where the pair of leather boots standing in front of her had come from, but she immediately regretted changing out of the baggy sweats.


End file.
